Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

“That ain’t no fire-station dog out there,” I said inside the place with some old-boy gusto and sawmill conviction, and a fellow chuckled, No, it ain’t, it was the pound guard dog, though, and I said I wanted it, and evidently I got it. I had got bad drunk and got a bad dog and called my bad mother and made a date to meet one of her bad lovers. I had torn a page, I believe the locution goes. All I could do now was buy some meat across the street and throw it in the backseat and drive and hope the dog did not bite me in the back of the head. I had gotten him in the car; it looked marginally tenable he’d let me in it now.

He did and we drove off. I named him My Inner Life. At the first pee stop My Inner Life ran off down a logging canal on a bayou named, as near as I can tell, Tennessee Williams. If it was not Tennessee Williams it was Joe Bourgeois, my map was considerably out of register. Up this same canal down which My Inner Life had disappeared shortly came loping toward me a giant nutria, bounding part beaver, part rat, with yellow incisors visible like a nine ball in its mouth. I could not get Louisiana. Huey Long and open-skulled monkeys and logging canals and South American rodents gamboling the land, and that land a weird admixture of ordinary South — landscaped colonial brick Farmers & Merchants Banks at crossroads where there appears no need for a bank, or for a crossroads, or for roads, and no farms are about — and unordinary South. The unordinary obtained when you found a canal named for a man named Joe Bourgeois or Tennessee Williams, take your pick. This canal here, in this swamp we ruined pulling oil out of it, and pulling logs out of it before that, let’s name it for John Doe — no, for that guy (queer, I think) who made that streetcar of ours, which no longer runs, I think, famous. Yes. Need him a canal. Somewhere out in the vast swamp before me could be an intersection of forgotten waterways called Dealey Plaza and Garrison Slough. I ran, a little ahead of the nutria, back to my car. There I found a receipt that indicated My Inner Life had had all his shots and was worm free and had cost forty-five dollars.

AT A JOINT CALLED the O.K. Bar No. 2 outside Mamou, I waited for my mother’s old lover, I think. I think it was the No. 2—perhaps I was in one of a chain of rough Cajun roadhouses (there was a great iron pan of crayfish for everyone, and I had some and was a stranger to no one’s discomfort) — and I think I waited for him, though it is possible he had been waiting for me, so smoothly and unceremoniously did he slide into the chair opposite me at some point. I had the feeling he’d been watching me.

There was immediately none of the big-brother directness, frontal elderliness, that I recall from our time before, but instead a kind of diffidence. He did not look so much at me as at the table between us, a little landscape of the lost lousy life: crayfish heads and beer in puddles. He put a crayfish head on his finger and moved it slightly, puppetlike.

“You’ve changed, but not much,” he said, and we both watched the crayfish on his finger as if it were the speaker. It was fine with me if it were. I had the sudden conviction there were plenty of things I did not want to know about this man. They were things that would disappoint me in my heroic memory of him as suitor to my mother, superior to Odysseus, as mentor to me, superior to Mentor.

He was smaller than I’d thought, but it was the knotted-down, dangerous-looking smallness of frame that you do not fuck with. And this looking-at-the-table business did not seem to indicate shyness so much as don’t fuck with me. I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say.

So we sat there. I thought we were like a couple of guys who’d get on better in the presence of women, but that meant one of them would be, in the likely neighborhood of our short history, my mother, and that didn’t seem to be the kind of thing I had in mind. I couldn’t get a fix on his age. He was in a flannel shirt. His hands were worked, thumbs suggesting small lobster claws. My hands were, and are, women’s hands, approximately.

“Come on,” he said.

He stopped at a glass cooler by the bar and removed two six-packs of beer from it and did not wait for acknowledgment from anyone, just left. I looked around to ratify this purchase, if it was one, and no one paid me any mind. His truck was moving when I got in it. “Better get your car,” he said, and I did that and followed him.

We went somewhere and somewhere else and somewhere and somewhere else, as if I were being kidnapped blindfolded. I had no idea where we were when we stopped and parked in a limestone cul-de-sac, the graded stone road looking phosphorescent in the moonlight, and got in a pirogue. It had a small forward deck on which was a dead nutria. As we motored the canal of some sort, I mezzed out on this nutria. Its tail was the size of a giant carrot and it had a dusky finely wrinkled skin like the callus on an old dog’s elbow, but it had hair coming out of it like fine stiff black wire. Or like the fiber inside moss, the dried core they used to stuff furniture with that you virtually cannot break. We went a long way on this canal, or these canals, or whatever they were, with the same you-might-as-well-be-blindfolded sense obtaining. I thought I might as well relax.

Life itself was, as I had been leading it, a blindfolded — volitionally in my case — affair. Were I not seeking the blindfold I’d have been already working in Atlanta or having a brotherly man-to-man with my father over some fine point in the management of my Republican portfolio. I was in a plywood boat with a giant dead rodent leading the darkly way. In the old days you got by Cerberus, the three-headed dog. Today you got by Nutria, the one-headed rat. Charon was a man who didn’t speak, didn’t look at you, slept with your mother, you thought, you hoped, once, but now you wondered what kind of queer desire it was to hope a man, any man other than your father — no, including your father — had slept with your mother. Who should sleep with your mother? Should anyone? The answer, in a bayou with barred owl accompanying us head-high in the tupelo gums and a hint of goner funk coming off the just-stiff nutria bowsprit, seemed to be no. No one should sleep with your mother. Ever. This would eliminate you and your problems.

I got a beer and enjoyed the ride. I saw a moccasin the size of a fat Schwinn tire, his white eye band bright off the water like a big smile. And I’m sure he was smiling: we were all out there in a moon-bright bayou, lost souls smiling in our lostness, the dead nutria the most content, but all of us having a very good time. This is what bayou and beer and lovers of your mother will have you believe, at night. In the daytime, of course, yanh yanh yanh …

WE GOT TO A HOUSE on stilts in a row of houses on stilts, a Main Street, of sorts, of black water. Access to this little town was decidedly by boat, or helicopter, if that wouldn’t blow the houses down, and it looked as if it would. Ours was two stories high, but the first story was stilts and the building itself was only seven feet floor to ceiling and, like the pirogue, seemed made entirely of plywood. Then I noticed parts of it were cardboard and other parts rusted-out screen. It fairly thundered when we walked in, and bent and gave, trampoline-like. It had a refrigerator that looked about fifty years old, with thick round ivory shoulders, about the size and bulk of a safe. A yellow bug light came on inside it when opened, and I noticed all the lights in the house, and, later, in the town itself, were yellow.

Taurus, if that was to be his name again, let me take it in and said, “Some nurses are coming by in a bit.”